HBS interview invite

Last Friday, HBS released about 800 interview invites to R2 applicants. I was lucky enough to get one of them. Since I was attending DAK at Kellogg, I was perfectly distracted from worrying about the invite. In addition, after R1, I was more realistic about my expectations and was psychologically prepared to not get an invite from HBS. So when I signed into the Kellogg wifi with my admit account(I thought that was a nice touch for Kellogg), and saw that invite sitting in my email, I was pleasantly surprised.

I felt honored to be selected by HBS to move on to the next stage in this almost cruel admission process. At the same time, I plan to continue staying humble and grounded, because I know there are so many applicants out there with amazing achievements, great aspirations and big hearts who didn't make it this time. And I am by no means better than them.

I also want to continue through the process with a realistic expectation. After-all, about half of all interviewed applicants don't make it in the end. Most applicants do well in interviews and a lot of time it will come down to factors outside of our control at this point. Therefore, all I aim to do is to try my best at the interview and be ok with whatever the final result would be.

btw, I had a great time at DAK. It was exhuasting but extremely informational and very fun. I will write a detailed post later this week with pictures!

Hope you had a great valentine's day or/and Chinese New Year! :)

5 down 1 more to go!

Finally I am reaching the end of the six month essay writing saga! With Stanford submitted last night, I only have one more app to go! This whole process feels like an accomplishment in itself!

Gotta prep for Friday's MIT interview first. These BEI questions are such a pain to prep....after writing 4 stories for MIT, I still need to come up with meaningful and preferably recent stories to show my actions and impact...definitely harder to prep than blind interviews...

On the other hand, I think it will be a cool experience though, since I haven't done one like this before. And life is all about experiences right? :)

Wish me luck! (and I wish you luck too!)

Kellogg Interview Report

As I promised in my previous post, I would share my interview experiences on accept.com and clearadmit's wiki once I got the result from the schools. The downside for doing this is that I can't really remember many of the questions asked during the interview. For Kellogg, I took notes soon after the interview so I still have a beefy report to give you. But unfortunately for Wharton, I did not take notes and the questions are forever lost~~~

Anyway, here is the report I sent to ClearAdmit, got a $10 itune gift card in return~ cool~ :)

Interview Date: Mid November, 2009
Admissions Round: R1 (admitted!)
Interview Location: On-campus
Interview Type: Adcom, blind interview

I selected to do the interview on campus during the Kellogg Preview Weekend (which btw, is an awesome event that you should check out, see my post on KPW). I wasn't sure if I was gonna interview with a student or an Adcom. But it looks like on Saturday you interview with student (I am not 100% sure about whether you always interview with Adcom during the week days though). I ended up in one female Adcom's office for the interview. She was very friendly and that relaxed me a little bit because I was quite nervous since Kellogg was my first interview. The interview started off with the most standard question about walking through the resume. I went a little far into explaining why MBA, and my interviewer actually smiled at the end of it and told me there was specific question for that later (I thank her for not interrupting me while I went off for that would have throw me off a little). All the questions were pretty standard Kellogg questions, even the leadership style one I have seen on accept.com interview reports. The interview lasted about 30 minutes and the interviewer left enough time for me to ask questions. Overall, the interview was like a relaxed conversation with the interviewer occasionally probing on points of interests. Because of my profile and my answers, the interview end up focusing a lot on leadership and team work, which allowed me to fully showcase my strengths. I felt that the Adcom was very experienced and asked lots of follow up questions. She also kept writing notes the entire time but kept good eye contact in between and had lots of positive confirmation through body language (nodding, smiling, ect.) Overall, I thought I did quite well and the admission later confirmed that.

My 2cents for interview prep: read interview reports from accept.com and clearadmit, prepare those questions, and prepare all of them. I always think it's good to over prepare than under prepare. Just make sure your answers don't sound rehearsed. Know your story, of course, but also know your strengths, and try to showcase as much as of it during the interview. And lastly, stay relaxed, don't get throw off by odd questions, just be confident and be your best self. Good luck!

Here is the list of interview questions that I remember:

Walk through your resume starting from undergrad experience?
What is your biggest accomplishment at work?
Leadership experience at work?
Follow up question on my leadership experience such as my specific actions and leadership style.
How has your leadership style progressed since college (through work and a specific extra-curricular activity)?
What role do you play on a team?
Tell me about xxx (a specific extracurricular activity on my resume).
Why MBA?
Why Kellogg?
What unique contribution can you bring to Kellogg?
What clubs do you plan to participate in while at Kellogg?
What do you do for fun?
Anything you want to say that we haven't talked about?

MIT still likes me :)

Just got an interview invite from MIT. After my Kellogg admission I was a lot more relaxed and did not fret over MIT and Wharton too much this morning. So the interview invite sitting in my inbox after lunch was kind of a surprise. Although in my heart, I had sort of convinced myself that I would get an invite from MIT because I thought I did a good job on those behavioral questions. Glad that MIT honored my confidence :)

Now with two applications to write and one interview to prep...I am gonna have a busy holiday season! Did I mention I am going to Mammoth for snowboarding as a toast to my first admit? December truly has turned out to be a fruitful month! :)

MIT Sloan is on the move!

The first interview invite has gone out for MIT Sloan according to gmatclub and business week forum, how exciting! Now I am getting really antsy! It seems like they release invites according to geographic locations, hum, I wonder if they will host local interview in LA. I wouldn't mind that since I am not sure how much I would enjoy visiting Boston in winter...oh well, jumping ahead of myself, have to get an interview first! :) I hope I get one, I like MIT Sloan.

Kellogg Interview, KPW and Wharton Interview

A lot has happened since last blog entry. Last week I went to Evaston for the Kellogg Preview Weekend for minority students, during which I had my first interview. Then this week, I had my Wharton Interview with a local alumni, marking the mid-point of my application season. Although now sitting in front of my computer, I don't feel relaxed because I still yet have 3 more applications to prepare. However, I do feel proud of myself for making it this far, without totally losing my mind. If I have advice for future MBA applicants, it would be to get organized and mentally prepared for a LONNNG journey, for it's definitely a test of your stamina.

Anyway, time to reflect on my trip to Kellogg and my interview. My Kellogg visit, by far, has surpassed my expectation for any school organized event. It was an awesome experience in terms of the caliber of students, professors and the level of organization, even the food! Come on, they served custom made omelette for breakfast and lamb for lunch! My "buddy" who reached out to me before the event specially came over during lunch to answer my questions. I saw way more students during this event than any events that I went to at other schools and everyone was genuinely nice! What impressed me the most, was actually the professors at the event. The legendary Prof. Steven Rogers was truly legendary, so were Prof. Harry Kraemer (former CEO of Baxter) and Prof. Katherine Phillips. It was not just their intellects but their passion for teaching management and educating the next generations of leaders really impressed me. I felt lucky to be able to experience this level of professorship and would see myself fighting over points to take their classes while at Kellogg. During one of the lunches, another group of professors and program directors sat with us and shared with us their Kellogg experience. That I thought, was an extra nice touch. I truly recommend anyone considering Kellogg to attend KPW. Here is a picture of the atrium in the Allen Center where the Marketing Competition TG (Thank God it's Friday) took place. Picture was taken by the end of the event, it was WAY more packed during the whole thing.















Now on to the juicy stuff, the interview. Well, it was much more relaxed than I had imagined. I couldn't remember the last time I interviewed for a job or something else, so I was quite nervous and prepared a lot before the interview. It turns out the interview was very conversational, and the admissions officer who interviewed me was very friendly and nice, so that helped too. The adcom seemed very experienced at interviewing and followed up quite a few points I made throughout the interviews. No surprise questions though, even the most difficult/interesting one I have seen it before on accepted.com's interview report. So do prepare those. It's always better to be over-prepared than under-prepared. Just don't memorize your answers.

Comparing to Kellogg interview with the Adcom, my Wharton interview with the alumni in LA was actually quite different. I thought an interview with alumni would be even more conversational. Turned out that my interviewer mainly asked questions from a list of questions and didn't follow up on my answers much. I guess that's how interviewer are trained. Adcom are just simply more experienced at this so they can follow up with your answers to weed out the nonsenses. Because Wharton gave you a list of alumni to choose from, I particularly avoided alumni with pure finance/PE field because my unconventional goal. In the end I interviewed with an alumni in the non-profit world and I am pretty happy with how the interview went.

I will write interview reports for accepted.com and clearadmit wiki once I hear back from these schools (hopefully in December for Kellogg!) since other people's interview reports really helped me prepare for my interview. Just don't want to jinx it at this point :)

Now it's time to start R2~ more essay writing~ yay....

Wharton Interview Invite!

My watched pot finally boiled!

I actually debated this morning sitting on the toilet with my iPod Touch in hand~ I have developed the habit of checking email first thing in the morning on Touch to see if my Wharton invite came in. But after weeks of disappointed mornings, I decided to take a different approach, that is deliberately ignoring the issue, not checking my email every 10mins and logging into the application site 5 times a day. Most importantly, I resisted checking those online forums where all the anxious b-school applicants go and speculate.

Then, it came. It almost caught me by surprise as I was expecting another disappointed morning. Although this invite only means I am among the top 40~50% of the applicants and by no means indicate admission, it got me just a little closer to my dream. I think what I really needed was the re-assurance, sort of an outside validation of your application quality. As my boss brutally put it, "your application is at least worthy of a Wharton interview~".

So the journey continues, R2 time frame is tighter, with more essays to write and interviews to prep. I am confident though, that I will be worthy of an admit, somewhere :)

oh, and today turned out to be even better, I got into the Biotech Women's Career development program in bay area in December, all expenses paid for and guaranteed a great time! I will use this opportunity to visit Haas too, it's been awhile, last time I visited the school was October 2006. I signed up to sit in one of its "Innovation, Creativity & Entrepreneurship" class, given the focus on innovation at Haas, this should be very interesting. (certainly will beat the unfortunate Wharton class I've visited...that's a story for another post...)

Also got an email from MIT confirming my application status. it feels like MIT's process is not as defined as Wharton's, well, don't need to stare at the calender then, less stress for me.

So much has happened today! I hope good news keep coming :)

Charging forward, girl!

still no invite from Wharton, but at least Kellogg app is confirmed

All the required elements of your application are complete.

If your interview has been completed, the application has been submitted for review to the admissions committee. If your interview has not been conducted, the application will be submitted to the admissions committee upon completion of the interview. The next status check update will be the admission decision (Admit, Waitlist or Deny). When a decision has been rendered, the Office of Admissions will send you an email notifying you to check your status for your decision. Decisions will be released throughout the round, but the majority of decisions will be released during the last several weeks of the round.

Oh, now the dreadful interview and endless waiting period~

Patience is a precious thing

so today, out of anxiety, I checked the notorious business week forum to see if others have received Wharton interview invites. Of course this did not help me with my anxiety... I wonder what will happen as the mid deadline comes closer and I still hear nothing...

Patience is such a precious thing~

Wharton's first day of interview release

So today is the first day Wharton starts extend interview invite. Although I know perfectly that the chance of me getting an interview on the first day of interview release is very small, I still checked my emails and Wharton application site multiple times throughout the day~ Waiting for an interview has become such an obsession...I guess I just need something to convince myself that my application is good enough to pass the first hurdle....Where did my confidence go?